In October 2017, Solano Labs, Inc. (“Solano”) announced its acquisition by GE Digital LLC (“GE Digital”). Since that time, we’ve been hard at work to integrate ourselves into GE Digital and plan the future of the Solano CI services (“Services”).

As part of the continued integration of the Service into GE Digital’s Predix Platform, please be advised that effective as of January 11, 2019 (“Discontinuation Date”):
1. GE Digital-Solano will cease operation and support of all versions of the Services available at https://solanolabs.com/ (the “Site”), including all tools, forums and other content and information on the Site;
2. the Services and Site will cease processing of all customer builds and GE Digital will delete all customer data (including without limitation, all customer data stored, analyzed, processed and/or used by the Site or Services); and
3. Your contract(s) with Solano, including all Terms of Service and amendments for the Services and/or Site will terminate, with this notice serving as GE Digital’s notification to you of the same.

Prior to the Discontinuation Date, you may access the Site and Services and request or download your data from the Services, consistent with GE Digital’s Terms of Service. Following the Discontinuation Date, your access to the Site and Services will be terminated and all your data removed. GE Digital, its affiliates and subsidiaries, will have no responsibility in connection with its discontinuation of your access or use of the Services or Site following the Discontinuation Date.

This notice will not affect any separate agreements you may have with GE Digital, its subsidiaries and affiliates, for other products and services, which will remain in effect in accordance with their terms. Should you have any questions or concerns regarding this notice, please contact us for assistance.

We invite you to consider transitioning from Solano CI to Predix CI. Predix CI is a continuous integration and delivery service integrated with the Predix platform that provides powerful, scalable systems and tools that enable software developers to build, test, and deploy apps and microservices efficiently and reliably. It is optimized for use with Predix apps and platform, but it supports other public or private cloud environments, and most common source control and artifact management systems.

Predix CI offers much of the functionality of Solano CI, with improvements to the UI, a more flexible configuration model, and a simpler configuration format designed for more varied CI/CD pipelines. It also supports the solano.yml configuration file and syntax unchanged. We expect that your projects configured to work with Solano CI will migrate smoothly into Predix CI with minimal effort on your part. We are thrilled to offer a free plan that includes 1 concurrent worker for no cost. More subscription plans and pricing details are available in the Predix service catalog here.

Please contact us at predix-ci-support@ge.com for help with creating a Predix account and configuring Predix CI, migrating your projects from Solano CI to Predix CI, or if you choose, to transition your data to another CI system. We hope to continue to work with you as a part of GE Digital through Predix CI.

At Solano Labs, we like to get more done faster. Solano CI was designed from the beginning to run tests faster by running them in parallel on multiple workers, and many of the features we’ve rolled out over the years were implemented with the goal of getting customers’ build results back to them as quickly as possible.

Another benefit of Solano CI is the customization of the build environment. We want our workers to emulate customers’ development/production environments, not the other way around. Our base workers have a great many software packages, libraries, daemons, and other executables pre-installed. This allows for quicker builds, as activating a package and/or specifying its version in a solano.yml configuration file is faster then installing it in every build.

With the goal of further improving build speeds and allowing customers to accurately match the build environment with that of their development/production systems, we are introducing Custom Worker Volumes. Instead of running builds on our default worker volume, this feature allows running builds on a worker volume of your choosing.

For now, Ubuntu 14LTS and 16LTS worker volumes can be selected, but with Solano BX powering this feature, completely custom worker volumes will soon be selectable on a per-repo or even per-branch or per-profile basis:

We had planned on waiting until the workflow/UI for customizing worker volumes was more polished before announcing this feature, but the release of Chrome version 59 adjusted our timeline. Chrome broke compatibility with our default worker volume (Ubuntu 12LTS) some time ago, and while we had been maintaining compatibility ourselves, the requirements for versions 59 make this no longer possible.

We have example configurations for packages that require Ubuntu 14 or higher customer worker volumes for:

As many in community are already aware, Snap CI will be retired in August of 2017. The offered migration is to GoCD, an on-premise CI/CD solution – as this product may not fit the needs to current SnapCI customers we felt it was appropriate for us offer a comparison to Solano CI so that customers migrating are choosing the most appropriate and easiest product to migrate onto.

Solano CI is a cloud-based CI/CD SaaS that allows customers to unlock incredible performance from their existing test suite. Solano CI customers have seen 10x improvements in testing time using our unlimited parallelism, advanced caching, and extremely customizable build process. Not only that, but Solano CI is extremely easy to get running and simple to customize to fit your exact build workflow.

Comparison of Solano CI to Snap CI

Here is a quick rundown of the main differences between Solano CI and Snap CI:

Interested?

We’re confident that Solano CI can get existing Snap CI customers running with their desired CI workflow in no time at all. Sign up for a free account and try us out – check out our documentation or contact us at support@solanolabs.com if you’d like to have a conversation about the migration process.

Solano CI supports sending outbound web hooks that contain various information about the status of a Solano CI session. These web hooks are great for collecting data on your Solano CI builds, but many of our users wanted the flexibility to send custom-formatted JSON blobs directly to third party services. Introducing: Web Hook Closures

Now, Solano CI supports adding a Javascript function that processes the JSON data before sending out web hooks. This will allow users to transform the JSON into a format that can be automatically recognized by any third party service that accepts incoming web hooks. Here is a simple example closure for posting session time stamps to New Relic insights (gist); simply replace the Insert Key with your API key.

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functiontransform_payload(payload){

varheaders={"content-type":"application/json",

"X-Insert-Key":"newrelic-insights-insert-api-key"};

varbody=[{"eventType":payload["event"],

"timestamp":Date.parse(payload["timestamp"]),

"session_id":payload["session"]}];

return{'status':'ok','headers':headers,'body':body};

}

Please let us know if you run into any issues, or have an exciting closure to share!

We’re happy to announce our integration with Google Auth. New users can now immediately sign-up using their Google credentials, and existing users can link their Solano CI and Google accounts to allow for quicker logins.

Existing users can visit this link to manage their Google Authentication settings. Please contact us with your feedback!

You might’ve already noticed, but your Solano CI report page may look a little different than you’re used to. We’re excited to release our newly redesigned Lifecycle display, giving you more insight into your build’s timing and progress.

This new lifecycle header splits your build into 4 logical sections:

Startup – This phase includes the time it takes from receiving notification that you would like to start a build, to the time that Solano CI workers are assigned and your code changes have been pulled.

Prepare – This phase includes any setup needed in order to successfully run your tests. This includes running setup and worker hooks, as well as initializing services you may have configured (postgres, mysql, elasticsearch, etc…)

Run – This is where we run your tests. Nothing more complicated going on here.

Finish – After your tests are completed, we run post build hooks, collect and upload logs, and complete any other teardown requested.

We’ve also made all of the timing data used to create this new heading available to users through our outgoing webhooks API.

Let us know what you think. This lifecycle update is a part of our ongoing focus on giving Solano CI users more visibility into every step of their CI build. Stay tuned for more releases in this vein.

Anyone who uses AWS and CI/CD long enough has invariably been told to store their AWS credentials in Environment Variables in order to use the AWS CLI to manage deployments or pull resources from S3. This is extremely unsafe for a varietyofreasons.

AWS has been recommending cloud-platform providers to utilize the AssumeRole API to provide another layer of security and traceability to external AWS Credential access. As a proud APN DevOps Competency Partner, we’re excited to be the first cloud CI/CD provider to announce our adoption of AWS AssumeRole as the recommended & most secure way to use AWS Account Credentials with your Solano CI builds!

Using AssumeRole w/ Solano CI

Follow the instructions here on setting up a cross-account AssumeRole policy in AWS. Make sure to follow the section that mentions “Allows IAM users from a 3rd party AWS account to access this account”.

You will be prompted for the External ID and AWS Account ID for the external account, you can find this information in your organization’s settings page.

Continue through the instructions, and copy the ARN for the new policy into the organization settings page and click “Save AWS AssumeRole ARN”. We will run a test to make sure the role has been set up correctly, and you will be presented with the following success message:

You can now use the AWS Code Deploy / Solano CI integration without the requirement of having to include Environment Variables with your build! You will also have access to the following temporary AssumeRole Environment Variables that will allow you to authenticate AWS requests using the new role:

Solano Labs is excited to announce the release of our brand-new GitHub Integration!

Using the newly built GitHub Integration, we are able to provide a catered onboarding tutorial that shows you how CI/CD works within Solano CI – all using free open-source codebases. The tutorial walks users through:

In addition to enabling this more robust onboarding flow, GitHub Integrations aim to give users more fine-grained control over the permissions granted to third-party applications. You can now give Solano CI access to your code on a repo-by-repo basis, eliminating the need for confusing bot accounts. The integration also gives the ability for Solano CI to have write access to your solano.yml, which will be used for smart in-app editing of your Solano Configuration.

If you know of an Open Source project that has CI needs, and you’d like to see it featured as a part of our tutorial flow, please reach out to us at support@solanolabs.com.

This onboarding tutorial is available to all newly created trial accounts. Please give it a try and let us know what you think!

We’ll be giving the option for current GitHub OAuth Integration organizations to migration to the new GitHub Integration in the next few months – if you’d like to explore migrating sooner, please reach out to us at support@solanolabs.com.

Solano Labs is proud to announce our most ambitious campaign to date. Our 30/30 promotion offers you 30% faster builds or a 30% lower CI bill. No catch. It truly is that simple.

Our technology is the most scalable in the industry and we are happy to issue an open invitation for anyone to try it by providing an extraordinary benefit in the form of faster builds or lower cost. We are bringing the classic soda blind taste test to the enterprise software world, so try Solano CI today and experience our patented auto-parallelization and newly redesigned onboarding flow and decide for yourself. It is easier than ever to set-up a Solano CI account and get your build turnaround time down to #coffeetime– the time it gets to get a cup of coffee. Here’s how you can get in on the 30/30 action: Spending over $1000 on CI per month?

Use the time or money you saved to throw a party for your team. Cheers!

Spending less? We got you covered too. Save 30% on your CI bill with Solano CI, connect a repo to get started.

Now relax and brew some coffee with the confidence that by the time your cup is ready your tests will be done and your team ready to continue working on core mission, not wrangling with test environments. Welcome to #coffeetime. It’s a bold move, but we are confident in our industry-leading speed and customer support. For more information on Solano Labs 30/30 visit www.solanolabs.com/3030, visit us at AWS re:Invent (Booth #2320), or join the conversation on Twitter at #coffeetime.